Happy Not at Your Best Day!
Water bottle missiles! Drool! Crinkly granola bar wrappers making their hungry rustlings! These are the benefits that come along with standardized testing week at public high schools mid-March. My personal benefit: besides being bored out of my mind, I actually have some free time on my pencil-distributing, trash-collecting hands this week. Today, I drank bad office-quality coffee three times and ate two of the extra granola bars (chocolate chunk Kudos, and I definitely prefer S'mores! Why don't they just make S'mores! varieties of EVERYTHING? S'mores! is the best flavor idea in the history of the world). After my boredom was inadequately satiated by consumption, I turned to my extra thick pad of graph paper and started writing about Poggio Mirteto, a small town in Italy where I stayed with a friend. It was a bad story. It was cliche, over-descriptive, and I think I used the word beautiful three times. I'm going to send it to my mom who will think it's a beautiful story.
But I was thinking today that it's ok to do things badly once in a while. I'm not saying I don't do things badly everyday, but I thought, even though I hate complacency, maybe I just need a day of good ole middle of the road mediocrity. I miss being sloppy and not being accountable for sloppiness trickling down into the minds of small impressionable creatures, so today was my day for not being my best. You better believe this felt good!
I believe we all need a day when we don't have to do our best. Let's have that day be March 11! Happy You Don't Have to Be Your Best Day! I'm already looking forward to next year! (If you finish everything with an exclamation mark or a rise in the volume of your voice, sometimes you can trick yourself that you're not being mediocre at all! S'mores! Mediocre?! Never!)!
Kate is grading. The first sentence of one of her essays is, "I've been to jail 20 to 30 times in the last ten years." I am drinking wine and pretending I don't have work to do. I found out today that the same child who stole my digital camera and cell phone from my desk also stole another teacher's credit card and tried to use it at the Walmart WHERE HER SON WORKS. Ooooops! He was not having his best day.
I tried to work out, and this was not the best attempt either, but I finished a half hour of lifting, and thought, no, this is not my best day, but it is a good one, and I like the novelty of this upside-down-honey-bear pace. If one day a year you give less of yourself, you know what you'll be giving the rest of the days? S'more! And you surely can't beat that.